We praise these young athletes when they succeed, so we might as well call it like it is when they don’t. Last night, with the Chinese women’s gymnastics team’s lead slipping to just 1.00 point with just the floor exercise remaining, American gymnast Alicia Sacramone completely choked, falling on her butt and stepping out of bounds. Her score was a miserable 14.125 and the Americans’ hope for gold was over. This followed Sacramone’s fall off the balance beam. Her mistakes in these two events were the difference between gold and silver. Choke.
Afterward, coach Martha Karolyi said the Chinese had messed with Sacramone’s head, stopping her from taking the balance beam twice before letting her go.
“They put her name up with a stop sign,” an animated Karolyi said. “She couldn’t go once, she couldn’t go twice, and in my opinion it was intentional. Alicia’s a little bit too emotional. I told her, ‘They tried to break your focus, and you let them do it.’”
Whether the Chinese did it intentionally is probably a 50-50 proposition. If they did do it intentionally, Sacramone certainly fell for it.
By Cyd Zeigler jr.
4 responses so far ↓
1 charles // Aug 13, 2008 at 1:36 pm
Let’s not make excuses of either age or anything. They won, the US choked. It’s simple. There’s always swimming!
2 Jack // Aug 13, 2008 at 8:00 pm
Sorry, but I don’t agree with the “if we can praise them, we can slam them” theory. They’re (often) not professionals. In this case, they’re certainly not particularly old. They’re athletes, gifted with ability that’s been trained by hours spent in a gym or a pool or whatever. We should praise them if they succeed & we should congratulate their effort if they fail. Their EFFORT isn’t limited to two weeks every four years. Appreciate that & their hard work — win, lose, or DQ.
3 Dennis // Aug 14, 2008 at 10:25 pm
One should also mention that Sacramone was the one who rallied her teammates at the team finals at the 2007 Worlds after a poor outing on beam, to come from behind and win the team gold in the final rotation. I think that’s the moment that should define her career, not what happened in Beijing.
4 Spurious George // Aug 14, 2008 at 10:46 pm
Um, your analysis is wrong, and I think it’s a little bit nasty. The Chinese team won by more than 2 points. Sacramone did not lose two points for the falls/misstep. And the Sacramone scores were kinda low, but they were still within her normal scoring range. If the US had to depend on her hitting perfect routines to win the gold, then they simply weren’t good enough to win the gold. That doesn’t leave enough margin for error in a situation where every athlete is going to be nervous, and almost everyone was making mistakes. The real reason Team USA lost is that they can’t touch the Chinese on floor and bars. The bars are generally a higher-scoring apparatus, but the only American woman who is capable of pulling down a big score is Liukin. And the US team has been uniformly weak on floor.
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